Chuck Gannon and several other writers traveled to Quantico last February and coached uniformed service members who produced Science Fiction Futures, the narrative accompaniment to the MCSEF. Writers included Commander Phillip Pournelle USN. The near-future military fiction they wrote can be downloaded as a free PDF at the link.

I was primed to be reflective about the movie because it was preceded by twenty minutes of trailers for truly dreadful movies that I don’t plan to see. About halfway through them, I said to myself, “No wonder the world is falling apart.” The prevailing narrative seems to be fighting and war as a response to everything.

Many of these movies strike me as right-wing narratives (though I suspect most of the people involved in making them don’t vote that way): Humans fighting either evil aliens or evil supernatural creatures. Others focus on the outsider who fights for us all, but gets no thanks – not a story about people coming together to solve their problems.

Stories like Rogue One might be seen as having a liberal bias – rebels fighting a fascist, dictatorial regime. But in every case the story assumes that the solution is to blow things up.

It’s not the violence and killing that I’m objecting to – I agree with pacifists about many things, but I’m not one – but rather the idea that those things are the only solution. A lifetime in the martial arts has taught me that while there are times when a physical fight (or a war) may be the best choice, those times are few and far between.

(3) UHLENKOTT OBIT. Rochelle Uhlenkott (1960-2016) died shortly before Christmas, reports Keith Kato, of complications from a flu infection. She was a UCI Extension instructor in Optical Engineering, and in SFF did a little bit of writing and editing. Her short story “The Gift” (as Rochelle Marie) was published in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress XI: An Anthology of Heroic Fantasy (1994),

(7) PROGNOSTICATION. Our secret agent informs us this wall mural will be on next week’s Mark Hamill’s Pop Culture Quest at Blast from the Past in Burbank.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY

December 29, 1939 — Charles Laughton is The Hunchback of Notre Dame, first seen on this day in 1939.

(9) LET THE CUTE BE WITH YOU. This German Star Wars-themed Christmas ad for Kaufland is really sweet – and you don’t need to know any German to enjoy it.

(10) TOVE JANSSON NEWS. In the Financial Times, art critic Jackie Wullschlager reviews “Adventures in Moominland”, which is showing at the Southbank Centre in London through April 23. British fans prepping for Worldcon can see this exhibit by Finland’s greatest fantasy writer and her creation, the Moomins, including discussions of why Tove Jansson thought herself more of an artist than a writer, how her lesbianism informed her work, and why she owned and read Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.

You reach the Southbank Centre’s Adventures in Moominland by opening the cover of a giant book that turns out to be a door. Flit through a few gauze curtains painted with Jansson’s illustr­ations and you find yourself standing in a storybook installation: a snow-clad Finnish forest with gleaming lights and a lost troll. “The sky was almost black but the snow shone a bright blue in the moonlight” when Moomintroll, the first troll not to hibernate, stepped out alone into a cold new world. Moominland in Midwinter (1957) is a small existentialist masterpiece — the story of a frightened, angry, isolated young troll who eventually comes in from the cold to understand “one has to discover everything for oneself, and get over it all alone”.

(11) FINAL TROPE. At The Book Smugglers, Carlie St. George says this is the final installment of Trope Anatomy 101 — “Choose Your Own Family”.

When we discuss common tropes in pop culture, we’re often analyzing them as inherently negative things, stereotypes or clichés that are in desperate need of subversion. And often, we’re right to do so; in this past year, we’ve already looked at some seriously problematic tropes in this column, from the waving away of chronic conditions and disabilities to the variety of fat-shaming tropes that arise time and again in film, television, and literature.

However, not every trope is harmful and some are actually quite delightful when embraced. Honestly, one of the reasons I love fanfiction as much as I do is that it downright revels in its tropes. They’re frequently used as signposts, specifically, welcome signs: “Are you looking for Huddle For Warmth Romances? How about Body Swapping Fics with a focus on Team Building? Come in, come in, you’re in the right place!”

…If those terms mean nothing to you, found family stories are about characters that come together and make their own family unit, despite not being related by blood. (Generally. Sometimes, a few characters in found families will be biologically related; think River and Simon Tam in Firefly, siblings in a disparate crew of misfits and criminals (who all just happen to share meals and celebrate birthdays with one another, deep in the black of space.) Very often these characters have been orphaned, disowned, or have otherwise extremely strained or stressful relationships with their biological families; the second family functions to support, celebrate, and mourn with one another in a way that their blood relatives will not or cannot.

(12) ROYAL COSPLAY. The Queen’s wardrobe selection for her Christmas broadcast led to a wave of science fictional levity —

As it stands currently, it doesn’t look like Toho’s Shin-Gojira (dubbed Godzilla Resurgence for us Westerners) will be making its way to the silver screen in North America this summer. With no mention of a US theater distribution company the chances of fans in the US and Canada seeing Godzilla Resurgence in a theater are extremely low.

The only semi-confirmed distribution company for Shin-Goji in North America seems to be a company called New World Cinemas. The downside is they’ve only listed home entertainment release on DvD for Godzilla Resurgence. The other downside is their projected release date is set in 2017… So, G-Fans over here will need to wait half a year to see Godzilla Resurgence… On DvD. We’re hoping Blu-Ray will also be available, but again, no confirmation.

Lockheed Martin has launched Generation Beyond, a first of its kind, national educational program to bring the science of space into thousands of homes and classrooms across America. The Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) program is designed to inspire the next generation of innovators, explorers, inventors and pioneers to pursue STEM careers.

Generation Beyond includes a real-life Mars Experience Bus that will travel the country providing student riders with an interactive experience simulating a drive along the red planet’s surface. The Lockheed Martin Mars Experience Bus is the first immersive virtual reality vehicle ever built and replicates 200 square miles of the Martian surface. The Mars Experience was built with the same software used in today’s most advanced video games.

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library needs $750,000 to pay its first three years of rent at a downtown Indianapolis building which has four times more space than its current location.

Library founder and CEO Julia Whitehead says that money will also help pay to reconfigure that 5,400-square-foot building for expanded programming and to exhibit more of its large collection, much of which remains in storage.

(5) THE MAGIC NUMBER FIVE. Cheryl Morgan, in “Some Awards Thoughts”, speculates about how the Hugo Awards’ 5% rule will come into play this year.

…The first thing to note is that the rule is 5% of ballots in that category, not 5% of ballots overall. 5% of 4000 ballots is 200 votes, and that will probably be required in Novel and the Dramatic Presentation categories, but participation in other categories tends to be much lower. In addition, there is a separate rule that says every category must have at least three finalists, regardless of the 5% rule. So no category is going to be wiped out by this…..

My guess is, therefore, that we’ll have a few categories with 3 or 4 finalists this year. We’ll be able to draw some pretty graphs showing how more participation means more variation. And that will be useful because a motion to remove the 5% Rule got first passage in Spokane last year. This data will inform the debate on final ratification….

Neil Gaiman flew in from the States to read his introduction to Pratchett’s 2014 non-fiction collection A Slip of the Keyboard, and found himself presented with his friend’s trademark hat. Gaiman, looking a tad thunderstruck, placed it for a moment on his head, but quickly took it off again, saying: “Oh, I don’t dare.”

Former People Speak: What do make of the direction Science Fiction has headed in since you edited New Worlds and New Wave of Science fiction began?

M. John Harrison: New Worlds and the New Wave were a reflection of the more general cultural changes which went on from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. I think science fiction headed in more than one direction as a response to those changes. Or perhaps better to say that it’s an elastic medium, it was heavily perturbed, and it’s been bouncing around inside its formal limits ever since. There was an immediate reaction against the New Wave in the shape of a Reaganistic “back to the future” movement, but that was soon swamped by the concomitant emergence of left wing, feminist and identity-political sf. Now we see an interesting transition into post-colonialism, intersectionality, and–at last–the recognition by western sf that rest of the world writes science fiction too. These are, like the New Wave, responses to changes in the general cultural context. I enjoyed my time at New Worlds, although by the time I got there all the important work had been done. I enjoyed the New Wave for its technical experiments–even in those, though, it was beginning to reflect the generalised cultural shift to postmodernism (while the science fiction Old Guard hunkered down and grimly dug in its heels against the demons of modernism, fighting the previous generation’s wars, as Old Guards will).

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY

Born April 16, 1921 — Peter Ustinov, who was in lots of things, including Logan’s Run.

(9) THE 100 ANGERS LGBT FANS. Washington Post writer Bethonie Butler says after Lexa, an openly lesbian character (played by Alycia Debnam-Carey) died on an episode of The 100, a lot of fans of the show vented, although the venting led, among other things, to raising a large amount of money tor the Trevor Project, which runs a suicide hotline for LGBT teens — “TV keeps killing off lesbian characters. The fans of one show have revolted”.

Many fans have stopped watching the show and have redirected their energy to Twitter and Tumblr to vent their frustrations. During the episode following Lexa’s death, fans tweeted with the trending topic LGBT Fans Deserve Better, which has since become an international fan-led initiative. As the show returned Thursday after a two-week hiatus, fans tweeted with Bury Tropes Not Us, sending the topic trending nationally. A fundraising effort has raised more than $113,000 for The Trevor Project, an organization that provides a 24-hour toll-free national suicide hotline and other services for LGBT and questioning youths in crisis.

(10) ASK GANNON ANYTHING. Chuck Gannon announced on Facebook he will be taking questions in a live session on Reddit.

For folks who were among my earliest readers (i.e.; Analog folks), and saw the earliest beginnings of my Caine Riordan / Terran Republic over a decade ago (now thrice Nebula nominated), this is the chance to ask some questions about my stories or what’s to come.

I’ll be on Reddit’s Ask Me Anything. April 20, 2 PM, but u can start leaving questions ~ 11AM EDT. & yes, in addition to answering questions about the craft and biz of being an SF/F author, I will spill beans in re my various series. (And particularly Caine Riordan/ Terran Republic.) PLEASE SHARE! And u can enter ur questions as long as u join Reddit (no cost) for just one day. You’ll be able to drop in by going to the front page of /r/books: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/.

(11) FAAn AWARDS VOTING DEADLINE NEARS. There’s just one week left to vote for the FAAn awards for fanzine activity in 2015. The deadline is midnight on Saturday, April 23. Award administrator Claire Brialey reminds —

So if anyone interested in SF fanzines is looking for something else to occupy their time before the Hugo award shortlists are announced, information about categories and voting can still be found at: http://corflu.org/Corflu33/faan2015.html

People don’t need to be members of Corflu to vote. They just need to have enjoyed some fanzines from 2015 and want to express their opinions about that.

Votes should be sent to me at this address (faansfor2015 [at] gmail [dot] com).

And the psychology of the human species is so poorly understood that the idea that we might survive for generations together in a big tin can is simply insane. Aurora digs into many of the social and psychological issues of generation ships, but ultimately Robinson is an optimist; a believer in the powers of the rational, scientific mind to overcome all challenges. Meanwhile, the science-fiction writing community can’t even organise the Hugo awards without descending into factionalism worthy of revolutionary France. Think the Sad Puppies are annoying now? Wait until you’re trapped in a space-biome with them.

Asteroids, gotta love the yummy things. For example: asteroid 5748 Davebrin made its closest approach to Earth April 4. (1.7 AU). Hey! I can see my house from here! Come on guys, it’s mine so let’s go melt it down and get rich.

And yes, this means it is time for one of our “look up!” postings, here on Contrary Brin!

For example…

Many of you recall the thrilling sight of Jupiter getting whacked multiple times by the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994. Now Phil Plait reveals some video taken this month by an amateur astronomer, which appears to reveal another one smacking the King World. And hints there may have been another collision some years ago. Yipe! This’ll affect the statistics, for sure. No fluke, after all. As Goldfinger said: “Three times, Mr. Bond, is enemy action.”

Nominally it’s as the title suggests – a dictionary/phrasebook of all those words created and amalgamated into the language of the TV series. For those who don’t know, Firefly is a future Western series set in the year 2517, where the language used by Joss Whedon’s characters is a mash-up of English and Mandarin Chinese.

So if you were wondering what words like ‘gorramn’ meant, then here’s the place to look them up. *

The writer, Monica Valentinelli , has a wealth of background that she draws on for this book. She worked on and became the lead developer and writer for the Firefly Role-Playing Game, and it is this that informs her work here. She has also had access to the original TV scripts.

(15) VERTLIEB ON JOINING RONDO HOF. Steve Vertlieb is thrilled to be voted into the Monster Kid Hall of Fame.

I awoke quite late last evening to a congratulatory telephone call from writer pal Jim Burns informing me of the astonishing news that I’d been inducted into The Monster Kid Hall Of Fame, the ultimate honor bestowed by voters in the annual Classic Horror Film Board competition for excellence in genre contribution. I am stunned, choked up, and deeply humbled by this wholly unexpected honor at the CHFB. I’ve been involved in organized fandom since September, 1965, when I attended Forry Ackerman’s very first Famous Monsters of Filmland convention in New York City, and have been a published writer since 1969 with my first published articles in England’s L’Incroyable Cinema Magazine. I dutifully voted this year for many deserving recipients of the “Rondo,” as I do each year, but I NEVER had ANY expectation of ever winning this most loving, prestigious award myself. I am profoundly moved by this wonderful recognition of my work for nearly than half a century, and want to thank everyone who helped behind the scenes to make it a reality. I’d also like to congratulate Mark Redfield and David Del Valle who happily share this distinct honor with me in the Hall Of Fame category, as well as Mark Maddox for his win in the Best Artist category, Gary Rhodes for Writer of the Year, and so many others whose artistic excellence has garnered them a well deserved commendation. I don’t know what else to say just now….except that I am utterly speechless and humbled by this wondrous honor, and most gracious kindness. Thank You all sincerely.

[Thanks to Will R., Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]